It is important that public-safety responders have an adequate link to communication services (for example, telephony, data services, and the like) when responding to an incident. However, in many instances, the available RAN signal may not have enough capacity to support the required public-safety mission. To facilitate communication between the responders and offsite utilities, incident area networks (IANs) are often set up using deployable networks. These deployable networks establish a link between a given mobile device (for example, a handheld mobile radio) and a given network resource, typically using some standard for over-the-air communication, for example, the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE) protocol.
It is desirable that a deployable network be able to communicate with public-safety responders as quickly as possible. However, it is also important that the deployable network minimally interfere with reception by mobile devices utilizing an overlapping wide area network (WAN) and that are not responding to the incident. Therefore, for the sake of general efficiency and for optimized allocation of network resources, it is important that transmissions by deployable base stations be coordinated with existing communication networks. On the other hand, occurrences of incidents often are unpredictable and therefore coordination between an IAN and an overlapping WAN often is, at least initially, nearly impossible.
Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions and/or relative positioning of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of various embodiments of the present invention. Also, common but well-understood elements that are useful or necessary in a commercially feasible embodiment are often not depicted in order to facilitate a less obstructed view of these various embodiments of the present invention. It will further be appreciated that certain actions and/or steps may be described or depicted in a particular order of occurrence while those skilled in the art will understand that such specificity with respect to sequence is not actually required. Those skilled in the art will further recognize that references to specific implementation embodiments such as “circuitry” may equally be accomplished via replacement with software instruction executions either on general purpose computing apparatus (e.g., CPU) or specialized processing apparatus (e.g., DSP). It will also be understood that the terms and expressions used herein have the ordinary technical meaning as is accorded to such terms and expressions by persons skilled in the technical field as set forth above except where different specific meanings have otherwise been set forth herein.